AT LUNCH WITH: Marc Salem; He Knows If You've Been Good, for Goodness' Sake

By ALEX WITCHEL

Published: December 11, 1997

''The word psychic troubles me, because it carries so much emotional weight,'' Marc Salem said. ''People don't go for advice unless they have a problem. Remember the beginning of 'The Wizard of Oz,' when the professor reads the crystal ball while Dorothy has her eyes shut, and he goes through her pocketbook? There are mental pocketbooks we carry with us.''

If that is true, Marc Salem is a mental pickpocket. Mr. Salem is the star of the Off Broadway show ''Marc Salem's Mind Games'' at the Westside Theater, which opened recently to favorable reviews for such feats as his reading the serial numbers of dollar bills while blindfolded and changing the time on someone's wristwatch without touching it. He is not a magician. He bills himself as a mentalist. Which means what, exactly?

''It means that I don't pry,'' he said recently during lunch at Michael's Restaurant on West 55th Street in Manhattan. ''I am a purveyor of mind games. At the furthest extreme, I will settle for thought reader, because a thought can be guided. The mind is shifting and changing every second. If you think about it, the idea of mind reading can be so intrusive. I try very, very hard during the program to get people to feel safe. No one is going to be humiliated. Nobody will know their deep dark secret.''

Too bad. Part of the plan had been getting the 44-year-old Mr. Salem right in the middle of a power lunch crowd and having him divine the inner thinkings of the high-ranking executives surrounding him. But he wouldn't play. He was willing to look at other tables and read body language -- he has a doctorate in communication research with a specialty in nonverbal communication -- but he was adamant on his no-prying rule.

''I know how the general public grasps at belief systems,'' he said. ''I've studied the psychology and sociology of belief systems, and I do not wish to foster one. I give no counseling or advice. I spend so much time demythifying what I do.''

The crux of what Mr. Salem does is to have people focus on a number or a word, urging them to visualize it, and he -- most times -- is able to see what they see. ''I don't always get it right,'' he conceded. ''To do this and get 100 percent all the time is impossible. But what I do is doable by everybody. I may be much better trained between instincts and empathies, but the point is that it doesn't draw from anything beyond our ken.''

The big question (''How does he do it?'') runs headlong into the big problem with much of Mr. Salem's discourse. He tends to combine the fast talk of a throat-elixir salesman with the high-toned jargon of a Ph.D. candidate preparing his thesis defense. After a windfall of words -- delivered with direct, sincere eye contact -- you rarely understand what he has just said.

But this is what he does: Once a director of research for ''Sesame Street,'' he continues to work with the show as a consultant. He trains lawyers on how to choose jury members. He gives seminars to corporate executives on improving their memory skills and interpreting nonverbal signals from business opponents. He teaches communications at Marymount Manhattan College, and he was an editor of Etc.: A Review of General Semantics. And now, after years of performing his mind games at parties, he was ''discovered'' at one of them by Anita Waxman, who with her partners David Richenthal and Jeffrey Ash is presenting him at the Westside in an engagement that has just been extended indefinitely.

At two performances during the last few weeks, the reaction in the audience was uniformly one of surprise, pleasure and shock. Especially since Mr. Salem is able, while blindfolded with his back turned, not only to identify an object as someone's driver's license or business card, but correctly identify the owner's address. The audience gasps in astonishment. The whispers of ''How? How?'' bounce off the walls. People line up and wait after the show to ask. Mr. Salem tells them to read Edward Hall's ''Silent Language.'' Yep. That should do it.

Pushing aside his salmon salad, Mr. Salem removed a pendulum from his briefcase. He drew a circle on a piece of paper divided into ''yes'' and ''no'' areas.

''The pendulum allows you to let your subconscious take over,'' he said. ''I've used this to help writers break their writer's block. You can also use it if you've misplaced something. You ask, 'Is it here?' and wait to see if the pendulum swings over yes or no. It's ideomotor response. It's the same way a Ouija board or a table worked in the last century with a spiritualist.

''I had a famous woman call me once. She had lost her jewelry, and we used the pendulum. She finally narrowed it down to a brick wall outside. She had put it down when she had been talking to workers.'' He smiled. ''Once we place something in consciousness, it never goes away.''

Next he removed a large iron key, the kind that might fit a dungeon door. He placed it across his palm and stared at it, until it flipped over. ''I thought of the direction I wanted it to move,'' he explained. ''Again, it's ideomotor movements, the mind influencing the key to move. If we lived in a different age, you would say the demons did that.''